In the Icelandic Annals there are frequent mentions of voyagers to Greenland being shipwrecked, and most of these cases doubtless occurred off East Greenland. In the sagas there are many narratives of such wrecks, or of people who have come to grief on this coast.
In Björn Jónsson's version of the somewhat extravagant saga of Lik-Lodin we read:[253]
"Formerly most ships were always wrecked in this ice from the Northern bays, as is related at length in the Tosta þáttr; for 'Lika-Loðinn' had his nickname from this, that in summer he often ransacked the northern uninhabited regions and brought to church the corpses of men that he found in caves, whither they had come from the ice or from shipwreck; and by them there often lay carved runes about all the circumstances of their misfortunes and sufferings."
The Northern bays here must mean "Hafsbotn," or the Polar Sea to the north of Norway and Iceland; the ice will then be that which thence drifts southward along the east coast of Greenland. According to another ancient MS. of the Tosta-þáttr,[254] Lik-Lodin had his name (which means "Corpse-Lodin") "because he had brought the bodies of Finn Fegin and his crew from Finn's booths, east of the glaciers in Greenland." This also shows that the east coast is referred to; it is said to have happened a few years before Harold Hardråda's fall in 1066.
In the Flateyjarbók's narrative of Einar Sokkason, who sailed from Greenland to Norway in 1123 to bring a bishop to the country, it is said[255] that he was accompanied on his return from Norway by a certain Arnbjörn Austman (i.e., man from the east, from Norway) and several Norwegians on another ship, who wished to settle in Greenland; but they were lost on the voyage. Some years later, about 1129, they were found dead on the east coast of Greenland, near the Hvitserk glacier, by a Greenlander, Sigurd Njálsson. "He often went seal-hunting in the autumn to the uninhabited regions [i.e., on the east coast]; he was a great seaman; they were fifteen altogether. In the summer they came to the Hvitserk glacier." They found there some human fire-places, and farther on, inside a fjord, they found a great ship, lying on and by the mouth of a stream, and a hut and a tent, and there were corpses lying in the tent, and some more lay on the ground outside. It was Arnbjörn and his men, who had stayed there.